#hostile environment

In May 2021, a UK Home Office dawn raid triggers one of the most spontaneous and successful acts of civil resistance in recent memory. In Pollokshields, Scotland’s most diverse neighbourhood, hundreds of residents rush to the streets to stop the deportation of their neighbours.

Article here

At least 250 people who were detained at Manston asylum centre during a period when it was dangerously overcrowded and grappling with outbreaks of infectious diseases are suing the government for unlawful detention and other breaches of their rights.

They include a woman who had a miscarriage, a child whose age was recorded as five years older than he was, classifying him as an adult, and a teenager who was a victim of torture and trafficking.

The claims arise from a time when the Home Office’s site in Kent for processing people who had crossed the Channel on small boats was described by a senior union official as “a humanitarian crisis on British soil”.

The former independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, David Neal, said the poorly managed and insanitary conditions there were so bad he was rendered speechless.

Andy Baxter, the assistant general secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association, raised the alarm about conditions on the site in response to concerns from members of his union who worked there. After visiting, he described an unprecedented situation which more closely resembled a refugee camp in an unstable country than a Home Office temporary staging post for new arrivals to the UK in a tranquil corner of Kent.

At the time that Baxter said Manston was in crisis, marquees that were supposed to be used for a matter of hours before asylum seekers were moved to more permanent accommodation were used for more than a month in some cases. People slept on the dirty ground on pieces of sodden cardboard. There were outbreaks of diphtheria, a disease rarely seen in the UK thanks to vaccination, and scabies. One man died after contracting diphtheria while claims of guards assaulting asylum seekers were investigated by Kent police.

But it was only in the months after this bleak period – between June and November 2022 – that the full details of what happened there began to emerge.

Those bringing claims against the government include a 19-year-old from Sudan who was a victim of torture and trafficking, although his vulnerabilities were not recorded while he was detained at Manston for 33 days. He said he was often hungry and was only allowed one shower the whole time he was there. He was not given any change of clothes. He said that some of the officials he encountered at Manston told him to “go back to your country”.

Another claimant, a 17-year-old Kurdish boy from Iraq, was given a birth date five years older than his actual age, despite insisting he was a child. He was detained for 12 days.

A Syrian woman had a particularly difficult time. She arrived in the UK with her husband and their five young children, but when her husband complained to guards about the conditions at Manston he was removed from the site and placed in an immigration detention centre.

She did not know where he had been taken and feared he had been deported. She and the children spent 11 days in a freezing, filthy tent, and were only allowed to leave it to go to the toilet. When her children contracted a sickness bug that was circulating at Manston, she had nowhere to wash their vomit-stained clothes as there was a shortage of running water, so she tried to wash them using bottled water.

She herself vomited every morning and later discovered she was pregnant. She was unable to access medical care while in Manston, and when she was released and could seek treatment, it was discovered that the baby had died inside her. After she and her children were released from Manston, she was finally able to reunite with her husband but says that the impact of being detained in Manston continues to affect them all.

Emily Soothill of Deighton Pierce Glynn, who is representing some of those bringing legal action relating to their time at Manston, said: “We consider that our clients were falsely imprisoned and that the conditions in Manston were such that their human rights were breached. People seeking asylum are more vulnerable to physical and mental illness; they have the right to be treated with dignity and should not be detained in this way.”

But the concept of Mexico playing England in Mexico City next Sunday………

Good news! G finally got refugee status after nearly ten years of limbo (in what is, according to every lawyer and organisation who's seen it, an incredibly straightforward case that should've taken about 5 minutes).

Bad news! As soon as you are a refugee, by definition, you do not qualify for asylum-seeker accomodation anymore. How do you find this out? By being evicted with very little notice. Ideally on a Friday afternoon when all the support services will be closing for the weekend.

Good news! As a refugee with a toddler, G should qualify for some kind of housing assistance.

Bad news! She doesn't qualify until she's actually homeless, so she couldn't start working on a contingency plan. They won't start working on her case as a vulnerable homeless person until after she's literally on the street with her toddler and nowhere to go.

“We can’t escape. Why do you keep trying to give the kids somewhere nice to live in this hell?”

“…I’m trying to give them somewhere nice to die.”

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Today’s campaign:

Dr. Hassan Adwan, from Gaza Funds.

€8,172/€98,000 [8%]

- It's cluttered with AI regurgitation. (This is particularly infuriating to me. If anyone is interested, I could make a post about my thoughts.)

- Old sites are dead and gone.

- Reddit destroyed itself. (I can go on a rant about this too.)

- Too much marketing bullshit.

- Ads! Ads! Ads! Ads! Ads!

- Stupid paywalls.

- Search engines suck at getting you what you want. SEO is a cancer.

- People trying to make a quick buck. I don't mind paying for some things, I'm talking about the 0 effort get-rich-quick crap.

- Propaganda, psyops, scammers, etc.

See enshitification and dead internet theory.

It's hard to filter all this crap out! It's particularly worse for people with conditions like ADHD, Depression, Autism, etc.

It also makes it harder for me to do my job. Sometimes I need specific, slightly in depth information. Due to SEO, I get surface level AI regurgitated crap. Multiple websites, all the same. They also come with a torrent of adverts. It's a user hostile experience. (Maybe I could write my own, better search engine. One that might allow me to blacklist and greenlist certain websites for certain searches. Or one that detects AI generated content and filters. Actually, a browser extension that detects AI generated content might be pretty helpful.)

I think I've run into webpages that just have AI generated recipes. It's awful. I'm at the point where I just want to use physical cookbooks. Those also don't have a novel about some irrelevant backstory and 69,000,000 ads obscuring the recipe. (Now that I think of it, maybe it would be useful to write an app that can convert a physical recipe into a digital one ...)

by Dion J. PIerre

Anti-Zionist students at Sarah Lawrence College threaten to kill Jews or kill themselves in front of them, the complaint alleges. Diversity officers assigned as advisers to the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) are in charge of processing complaints of antisemitism, the lawsuit continues, and when Jews are killed in Israel, those officers promote anti-Zionist events promising to debunk the so-called “mainstream narrative” about the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

The school’s alleged disregard for the welfare of Jewish students was revealed in the days and weeks after Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, the complaint explains. No sooner had the tragedy occurred than Briana Martin — SLC director of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) — called on students to ignore Jewish suffering by attending on Oct. 9 “Hour of Solidarity with Palestine,” an event co-sponsored by SJP. While promoting the event, Martin invited Jewish students and Hillel members via email to attend it — a gesture, the complaint says, that the SLC Jewish community found “offensive and dehumanizing.” They soon discovered that in addition to being the school’s chief DEI administrator, Martin is SJP’s adviser, acting as the club’s advocate and liaison.

“Having been sent even before Israel had initiated any military response, the email’s message to ‘understand the mainstream narrative’ could only be interpreted to support SJP’s narrative that Hamas was justified in slaughtering Israeli civilians,” the complaint argues. “That such an obviously hostile and dehumanizing message would be delivered to SLC’s Jewish students by the director of the very office charged with protecting SLC’s minority Jewish student community sent a clear message that the SLC administration has chosen sides and that it would not protect SLC’s Jewish students.”